Women in Meiji and Taisho Eras
Both the Meiji and the Taisho periods in Japan saw women making some progress toward a more equal place in Japanese society and polity as the country as a whole struggled to create an identity for itself that was both modern and Japanese, a difficult task in a nation (and in an era) in which becoming modernized was seen as equivalent of so many as being equivalent to becoming Westernized. As Gordon, in his 2003 A Modern History of Japan, and Sievers in her 1987 Flowers in Salt argue, these two periods saw greater freedom for Japanese women who began to take a more public role in both the family and the political life of the country. But the gains for women - as for men - were unequal, as both class and region (as well as individual talent an initiative) affected the ability of women to redefine the role that their sex had traditionally held.
The Meiji period, as Gordon outlines in Chapter Five, "The Samurai Revolution," began with a political revolution that returned the country to direct imperial rule under the Emperor Meiji and brought to an end the era of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The emperor took advantage of the restoration of his power to try to push Japan towards the West and to introduce Western concepts of modernization. The effect - over the period of Meiji rule from 1868-1912 included the rise of a much larger and more powerful middle class in Japan. This came about in no small way because the samurai who lead the restoration understood that their own rising power - as well as that of the imperial house - was dependent upon the diminishment of power by the feudal lords.
The samurai inhabited...
But the lessening of the strength of traditional feudal families had as one result an increase in the relative strength of women, if only because their status within feudal households had been so low. In many ways, the position of women in Japan during these two eras appears to be better than perhaps it actually was because, as we study history, we take a relative view, and the role of women in Japan was relatively higher than it had been but - as Sievers (40-1) suggests - this relative improvement in the status of Japanese women was still small in absolute terms.
The samurai who brought about the Meiji restoration under the slogan of "a wealthy country and strong arms" also helped to bring about a substantial increase in the degree of urbanization of the Japanese population (as Gordon describes in Chapter Seven, "Social, Economic, and Cultural Transformations"). Many families left the country towns where they had lived for generations even as many of the country's elite moved to Tokyo as the capital of the nation shifted to the city once known as Edo.
This combination of increased urbanization along with a higher degree of mobility tended to loosen the traditional strictures on women's physical and social mobility. Japan certainly did not become overnight the nation of relative strangers living today that marks contemporary American society, but it did become a society in which people had a greater degree of freedom from the oversight of their extended families. As Sievers notes, this tended to benefit…
